While, at a glance, this may seem like another cash grab on an American company overseas, the long list of complaints filed by France’s Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control seems pretty legitimate.

The DGCCRF outlined 10 clauses in Apple’s contracts specifically that it wants the company to remove. The clauses relate to stipulations Apple enforces including the amount of product carriers must order, advertising requirements, mobile plans and other guidelines the carriers must follow in order to sell iPhones. Other clauses relate to Apple’s permission to use patents held by carriers, requirements for carriers covering costs of iPhone repairs and in-store displays, and the fact that Apple doesn’t have to adhere to similar guidelines within the contracts.

Are you satisfied with that home automation solution you bought year or two ago? You are? Well too bad, Google bought the company and they are killing your device. Well, at least you can still get a Nest. Wait. Never mind.

Revolv is a home automation hub that Google acquired 17 months ago; yesterday, Google announced that as of May 15, it will killswitch all the Revolvs in the field and render them inert. Section 1201 of the DMCA -- the law that prohibits breaking DRM -- means that anyone who tries to make a third-party OS for Revolv faces felony charges and up to 5 years in prison.

Last year, Google started changing its network security policies to a new model of “zero trust,” which treats its own internal network as the insecure Internet. Google released a new paper detailing how this new model works for its network security policies. The new model, called “BeyondCorp,” should put an end to conventional perimeter-breaching attacks, which can expose most computers on a network due to a lack of strong device-oriented security.

"Unlike the conventional perimeter security model, BeyondCorp doesn’t gate access to services and tools based on a user’s physical location or the originating network; instead, access policies are based on information about a device, its state, and its associated user. BeyondCorp considers both internal networks and external networks to be completely untrusted, and gates access to applications by dynamically asserting and enforcing levels, or tiers, of access,” said Google security engineers in a recent paper.

BeyondCorp Components

The BeyondCorp infrastructure contains multiple components that all play a role in increasing the security of the network.

Devices And Hosts

The first part in implementing BeyondCorp is choosing a basic inventory of devices and “hosts,” which represent specific versions of certain software that can be trusted to be secure. Tiered Access
After a given set of devices is selected, Google enables “tiered access” for devices and resources. Each device would need to have the same level or higher of trustworthiness as the resources that need to be accessed. This is useful to avoid having employees access highly sensitive information from a PC or mobile device that has low security. The more sensitive a resource is, the more secure the device and the operating system on it need to be, before it can be accessed.Device Inventory Service
This service provides a cycle of updates, vulnerability scans, digital certificates, and general asset management for devices. It also retains historical data, allowing for security audits later on and to keep track of device life cycles. Types Of Data
Google puts data in two categories: observed and prescribed. The observed data includes items such as:

The last time a security scan was performed on the device, in addition to the results of the scan

The last-synced policies and timestamp from Active Directory

OS version and patch level

Any installed software

Prescribed data is manually maintained by IT operations, and includes:

The assigned owner of the device

Users and groups allowed to access the device

DNS and DHCP assignments

Explicit access to particular VLANs

Google uses all of this data to see where there is a conflict, which could point to a possible breach.Data Processing
To keep the Device Inventory Service up to date, all data must be transformed into a common data format. Afterwards, the data is correlated to create unique device specific records. Google warned that this is not an easy task, as it may be hard to correlate certain identifiers such as digital certificates, asset IDs, and hard drive serial numbers to describe a single device. Complications can also arise if these identifiers are manually added incorrectly into the system.Trust Evaluation
To quality for a high level of trust, a device would need to meet all of the following requirements, and possibly more:

Be encrypted

Successfully execute all management and configuration agents

Install the most recent OS security patches

Have a consistent state of data from all input sources

Interestingly enough, although Google has been saying publicly that we shouldn’t worry too much about the Stagefright vulnerabilities in Android, the company itself was at the time banning devices with these vulnerabilities from accessing its network.Exceptions
Google’s BeyondCorp infrastructure has some exceptions for its devices as well, which is meant to reduce the deployment of policy changes. For instance, Google could override the access policy of certain devices, either to completely block them from the network (before the vulnerability scanners are updated to account for new zero-days affecting those devices) or to permit untrusted devices to connect to a lab network. Google also said that IoT devices may be harder to secure, which is why they will be assigned their own trust tier.Deployment

Google gradually rolled out the BeyondCorp access policy system to minimize disruption of its employees’ work. After the team in charge of deploying BeyondCorp verified the workflows of lower-tiered devices, they moved on to apply fine-grained restrictions to higher trust tiers. This continued until the trust tiers were assigned retroactively to all of Google’s devices.
Google discovered that it was actually easier to secure mobile devices because of the lack of legacy protocols and access methods, and because all communications are HTTP-based, which can be secured cryptographically. Biggest Challenges

One of the biggest challenges Google met when deploying BeyondCorp was the incorrect data about the devices entering the network, which would cause them to unintentionally lose access to corporate resources. Device records can also be corrupted when certain components are changed in a device. To solve this, Google has focused on increasing the accuracy of inventory data, which has also led to an increase in devices that can be updated with the latest security patches.
Google also found that it needs to have just the right amount of communication during such changes. Otherwise, under-communicating the changes could leave users confused, whereas over-communicating could lead them to find excuses for exemptions.Disaster Recovery

To avoid a catastrophic failure of the BeyondCorp infrastructure that would leave everyone locked out of their devices, Google implemented disaster recovery practices that can be employed only by an “extremely small subset of privileged maintainers.” In case of an emergency, a company also has the ability to push fine-grained changes to the access policy that would allow the maintainers to start the recovery process.
Google believes that BeyondCorp improved the company network’s security significantly without sacrificing usability. It also thinks that the principles of this model can be used for other companies’ networks, as well.

Weirdy beardie software that writes a song about everytime it is forked and dumped
Google is so hacked off with Oracle's java antics it is seriously considering taking it out of Android and replacing it with Apple's open sauce Swift software.

While we would have thought that there would be little choice between Oracle and Apple as evil software outfits, the fact that Apple uncharacteristically made Swift open source might make life a bit brighter for Google. At the moment Oracle is suing Google for silly money for its Java use in Android.
Swift was created as a replacement for Objective C, and is pretty easy-to-write. It was introduced at WWDC 2014, and has major support from IBM as well as a variety of major apps like Lyft, Pixelmator and Vimeo that have all rebuilt iOS apps with Swift.
But since Apple open sourced Swift, Google, Facebook and Uber have al said that they are interested in it. Taking Java out of Android is a big job. Google would also have to make its entire standard library Swift-ready, and support the language in APIs and SDKs. Some low-level Android APIs are C++, which Swift cannot bridge to. Higher level Java APIs would also have to be re-written.
Of course if it did all this, Apple might realise that its biggest rival was using its own software to club it to death. It might not be be so nice about allowing Swift out to play and eventually Google have to fork Swift and dump the Apple version. This would probably result in an anst-ridden moany album about how life is so unfair which makes a fortune while scoring passive agressive revenge on the dumpee.

Technology is a great thing, it can be used to help people all over achieve and complete tasks that they previously considered difficult or even impossible. Science and technology have enabled those who couldn’t walk to walk again, those who would lose their eyesight to keep it and even those who might die to survive. In their latest support, Google.org has pledged $20 to support disability technologies.
Spread over 29 programs, each receiving $750,000, with six grant winners getting more than $1m each. The programs that the money will support can be contained within five categories, hearing, mobility, cognitive, vision and communication. The projects include My Human Kit, a provision to provide people low-cost 3D printed prosthetics and The Center for Discover which looks to turn everyday manual wheelchairs into powered chairs.
Perkins School for the Blind looks to enable the creation of GPS instructions to help those with visual impairments navigate around the world while the Dan Marino Foundation looks to provide a tool for people with autism to train for job interviews.
As part of their Impact Challenge, Google.org (Google’s philanthropic division) looks to help the millions of people who live with disabilities, and if technology can do anything to help people’s lives I’m all up for supporting it.

There's quite a bit of poaching that goes on in the highly competitive tech industry, and this time it was Facebook that scored a prize, prying Regina Dugan from Google. Dugan lead the Advanced Technologies and Projects Group at her former employer, and prior to that, she was the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Now Dugan will head up a new hardware group at Facebook called Building 8. The group will focus on breakthrough technologies and innovative products designed to advance Facebook's mission of "connecting the world." In particular, Dugan and Building 8 fit into Facebook's 10-year roadmap announced at its F8 developer conference. The roadmap is focused on making advances in augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence, connectivity, and other areas.

"I'm excited to have Regina apply DARPA-style breakthrough development at the intersection of science and products to our mission. This method is characterized by aggressive, fixed timelines, extensive use of partnerships with universities, small and large businesses, and clear objectives for shipping products at scale," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.

Dugan described her transition from Google to Facebook as "bittersweet," noting that she's "tremendously excited" about Building 8 and how much there is to build at the world's largest social network, but also "sad to leave" her former co-workers. Her parting message to them was to "make some epic sh*t."

Building 8 will do the same under the guidance of Dugan and resources of Facebook. Zuckerberg said his outfit will be investing hundreds of millions of dollars into Building 8 over the next few years, so one thing Dugan won't have to worry about is funding.